Drake Defeats Apathy

Having raised four teenagers and taught hundreds of others, I’m very familiar with their brand of honesty. You might think that I would not be thrilled to get a game review from one, but …

You’d be dead wrong

It was 7 pm, a couple of hours before I normally knock off working, and I opened an email from a father in Kentucky. It simply said:

He typed it in word so I am just going to attach the file. I hope it helps. He was very sincere about wanting to offer up advice.

Here is his son, Drake’s, review:

(Fish Lake)I think you could make it a little easier to get stuck on the shore because I found that I could just cruise right down the side with the right half of my boat in the sand and not get stuck and go right through the obstacles. You could also make it a little easier to get through the river. I found it pretty hard to get down the first part of the river without sticking to the side. You could maybe add checkpoints after each obstacle because I got very frustrated when I hit a log at the end and got sent all the way back to the beginning, it made me want to just quit and stop playing honestly. But I didn’t. In both fish lake and spirit lake the ratio of play time to answering math questions leaned heavily towards play time. In Spirit Lake I think you could also add some sort of aiming system when you get ran up the tree by wolves. I’ve been playing fps (first person shooters) and other games like that for a little while and I found it challenging to hit all the wolves.

Why was I ecstatic about a review that had some criticisms of our games, so happy, in fact, that I forwarded it to all of our staff?

Because, the biggest challenge for start-ups to overcome is not raising money, developing a product or fighting off competition from Google and Facebook. It’s apathy.

Most people neither know nor care that you exist. To me, the fact that Drake actually CARED enough to get on Word, write up a review and get his dad to send it to us was huge.

For the rest of the story, when I asked Drake’s dad for permission to publish his review, he responded.

Absolutely … We played it together as some father and son bonding time. Sometimes it’s hard to find quality teaching material and just the fact that these games are being made and worked on makes me happy. It kinda took me back to my childhood with a Oregon Trail type feel.